There is great interest today in identifying factors that effect business performance, and employees are valuable resources of information when it comes to assessing features of business culture. For this reason, it is highly desirable to survey employees to obtain soft metrics relating to features of business culture. With a well-crafted survey garnering a high rate of participation and valid data, it is possible to establish correlations and/or associations between features of business culture and performance of the business. Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), for example, can greatly benefit from the ability to identify and measure these correlations and/or associations, and to plan and act accordingly.
Unfortunately, businesses executives face numerous challenges in surveying their employees. For example, most businesses lack the resources, such as expert personnel, to conduct surveys of with high reliability (which generally means replicability) and high validity (which generally means accuracy). Also, in-house surveying efforts are often thwarted by employees' reluctance to criticize features of business culture when survey data are available to the business in a form that can potentially reveal the responses of a particular respondent. For these reasons, the present invention uses an outside consulting company to conduct surveys and hold data of particular respondents in strict confidence while presenting results of a subsequent analysis to the employer in an aggregated form.
An outside consulting company surveying employees to obtain useful data faces challenges of its own. For example, it can be difficult to administer a hard copy (paper) survey to employees that have different schedules and locations. Mail-based distribution of surveys, and/or electronic (Web-based) distribution of printable surveys to employees at home or at work are solutions used according to various alternative embodiments of the present invention. The distribution at work still presents employees with the prospect of having to mail data from work, leading to potential interception by in-house personnel, or taking the survey off of business premises for completion and/or mailing. The mail-based distribution at home, however, places a burden on the outside consulting company and/or employer to mail the surveys to potentially thousands of addresses in various countries. For these reasons, the present invention preferably implements a Web-based distribution of an automated electronic survey that employees can take on or off business premises.
Use of a Web-based distribution of an automated, electronic survey to employees, although overcoming many challenges and presenting certain inherent advantages, faces further challenges due to typically decreased participation and/or validity of data obtained with automated, electronic surveys as compared to paper surveys. For example, employees are less likely to participate due to fears relating to confidentiality, difficulty of access, poor presentation of survey content, and/or inability to read ahead or scan the survey in its entirety prior to participating. Also, respondents to automated electronic surveys are more likely to give more extreme responses on an automated electronic survey and/or otherwise skew the data by giving generally higher scores to questions. For these reasons, the present invention provides an automated electronic survey with access, information, presentation, and content features that respectively: (a) assist the user in locating, initiating, navigating, completing, and submitting the survey; (b) assist the user in perceiving, interpreting, and completing the survey; (c) enforce psychologically advantageous communication capabilities; and (d) obtain data in a statistically quantifiable manner, such that respondent behavior can be automatically monitored during survey administration to detect potential inaccuracies of and offer respondents opportunities to review and change the potentially invalid responses.
Even with valid data successfully obtained by an outside consulting company, a still further challenge is faced in presenting results to the employer in a manner that can be readily understood. For example, in many organizational settings, identification of linkages between business performance and features of corporate culture is best accomplished using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM). HLM identifies correlations and/or associations as correlation coefficients and/or multiple regression coefficients that control for various potentially significant confounding factors. The values and interrelationships between these coefficients, while speaking volumes to the survey expert, have relatively opaque meanings when presented to CEOs and the executives who report to them, primarily because such executives typically lack training in survey methodology and multivariate inferential statistics. Thus, the present invention identifies links between business culture and features of corporate culture based on statistical significance of the coefficients and magnitudes of the coefficients relative to predetermined thresholds, where all statistically significant coefficients of sufficient magnitude relating to a particular correlation and/or association are required to be non-contradictory (similarly signed). A resulting table of significant, consistent, and non-contradictory links of various relative strengths is then presented to the employer in a readily understandable manner.
The employee assessment tool according to the present invention is advantageous over previous attempts at providing employee assessment services in that employee participation, ease of use, and validity of data are increased, while difficulties in understanding and utilizing data are decreased. Further areas of applicability of the present invention will become apparent from the detailed description provided hereinafter. It should be understood that the detailed description and specific examples, while indicating the preferred embodiment of the invention, are intended for purposes of illustration only and are not intended to limit the scope of the invention.